The CPU community is abuzz at the moment thanks to the upcoming release of AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series, but with AMD just having announced a delay to the release schedule of the processors you might be wondering when you’ll be able to check out some reviews.
AMD has remained somewhat cagey on details ever since they officially announced the Zen 5 processors back at the start of June. We don’t, for example, have official 9000 series prices just yet, and performance and power usage stats are largely limited to AMD’s own comparisons. We have had some indication that the Ryzen 9 9900X’s gaming performance is slightly lower than that of the 7800X3D thanks to leaks at least.
AMD Ryzen 9000 Series reviews will be available from August 7th
The official embargo dates for the Ryzen 9000 Series CPUs have been announced as the day before their respective release dates and are thus staggered as follows:
- Ryzen 5 9600X, Ryzen 7 9700X – August 7th (ahead of August 8th release)
- Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 9950X – August 14th (ahead of August 15th release)
Originally AMD were targeting a July 31st release date but since they postponed that, they have also pushed back the review embargos for their new line. This staggered lift of the embargos should also give reviewers plenty of time to collect data and piece together their coverage, not having to rush it out all at once.
What this means for you
For you and me, this means that if you want to read a full review of any of these new CPUs you’ll have to wait for another week or two but this might be an advantage in some ways. It’s also worth mentioning that the indications that the Ryzen 9900X isn’t performing as well as the 7800X3D shouldn’t be too much cause for concern thanks to the large overclocking potential AMD is promising for the 9000 Series as well as the rumored low pricing of the range.
In comparison, Intel CPUs have recently been plagued with crashing issues but have announced a microcode update is coming by mid-August which should fix the problem (though they may not fully understand it themselves). Now, if you hold on for another couple of weeks, you should be able to see whether this patch fixes Intel’s CPU problems and therefore factor that into your CPU purchase.
